Yahoo - It's Not Easy Being Yang

It's no crime that Yahoo was slow to recognize social networking as the replacement for web portal stickiness, and CEO Jerry Yang wants to start bringing the masses back to Yahoo, if only for a brief visit. Yahoo has websites that draw millions of visitors each month. They routinely track at or near the top of the Web's most heavily trafficked properties. Yet there's been a sense that the company could do more, a feeling that led to the ouster of former CEO Terry Semel and Yang's return to the big office.

In the earlier times of Yahoo's growth, they and most other websites worshiped stickiness as a virtue. Keeping people within the periphery of the top-level domain mattered the most.

But time flies and people's habits change. A "Openness is upon us," said Yang. "There is an opportunity for Yahoo as a huge publisher to play the open game and do that as a strategy."

Yahoo has made strides in opening technology, like with Web Services On the social networking side, Yahoo has made several acquisitions in the space, such as Delicious and Upcoming. They lack a single strategy of melding the best of the technologies they own into something Facebook-like, that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

It's easy enough to identify what Yahoo, and Yang, needs to do. They have a lot of pieces that need to be connected together, in a way that people can use them effectively from one interface.

There's just one problem: Yang. He told